hey, i would like to share with you about my passion for the Old Testament (OT). my students call me 'rabbi' or 'reb' for short.
the reb's passion in life (apart from God and wife and family) is the OT.
the reb used to teach the OT in a seminary. he also does a lot of weekend teaching and preaching in churches. and he writes and authored 9 books...
email: aloke6@gmail.com

Friday, 5 August 2016

Archaeological team prepares 4,000-year-old Hittite meals

DAILY SABAH WITH ANADOLU AGENCY

ISTANBUL

Published

September 8, 2015

Archaeological team prepares 4,000-year-old Hittite meals

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment

The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings. "We conducted research on kitchen culture, food and bread of Anatolian-Hittite cuisine dating back 4,000 years," he said. Akkor added that the food was cooked by imitating the period's conditions. "Ancient settlers wrote that they ate cold meat, cooked onion and bread on a festival day. They did not use yeast while making bread or cook them in moist ovens. The team tried to make it with pounded wheat, not sifted flour," he said.

Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Most Christians believe that the book of Isaiah was written by one person, the prophet Isaiah who lived in Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C. This belief is based on two factors. First, people believe that Isaiah wrote the whole book because the book bears his name.

Second, people believe that Isaiah spoke about the coming Messiah and thus, to deny that Isaiah was the author of the book is to deny the inspiration of the Bible. Christians who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible believe that, if the Bible says Isaiah wrote the book, then to deny that Isaiah wrote his book is to deny the inerrancy of the Bible.

This view, however, is misleading for two reasons. The Bible is the inspired word of God even though Isaiah did not write the whole book of Isaiah. Second, just because the name of a person is on the title page of a book, it does not mean that that person wrote the book. Let me explain.

In the Old Testament we have the book of Samuel, more precisely, we have 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. But 1 Samuel 25:1 says: “Now Samuel died.” But 1 Samuel continues through Chapter 31 and then there is 2 Samuel. If Samuel died in Chapter 25:1, who wrote the rest of the book? We do not know and that is not important, because whoever wrote the book of Samuel was as inspired to write the book as if Samuel had written the whole book himself.

Monday, 1 August 2016

This third-century papyrus leaf—known as POxy 1—was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and contains sayings of Jesus written in Greek. Scholars later determined the text was from the elusive Gospel of Thomas referenced by early Church Fathers. Photo: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Jesus says, “Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human.”
Jesus says, “Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

These bizarre statements are two of the 114 sayings of Jesus found in the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas is a non-canonical collection of the sayings of Jesus reputed to have been dictated to the apostle Thomas. In “The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?” in the July/August 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole examines what these 114 sayings of Jesus reveal about the early Christian world in which they were written.

A work called the Gospel of Thomas has long been known from references by Church Fathers as far back as the third century. What was actually in the Gospel of Thomas, however, remained elusive until the 20th century. Excavations at an ancient garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, around the turn of the 20th century uncovered papyri fragments containing sayings of Jesus that had been dictated—the papyri claimed—by Jesus to his disciple Thomas. Scholars date these papyri to the early to mid-third century C.E.